Gratitude continued.

I started listing things I am grateful for last month and found a sight from a friend http://www.gratitudechallenge.com/ which is a challenge to list daily for 21 days things that you are grateful for and I joined it today.  Being someone who battles with depression I've been told that one of the ways that helps to put a dent into it is to daily remember what it is that you are grateful for before you go to bed or write it down regularly so that you start conditioning yourself to see the good instead of the negative.  I am guilty of being too negative about myself where I would not let someone else say the things to me that I say to myself.  Weird, huh?
Another thing that has been very effectual in giving me insight to those things in my head and my heart has been listening to Mother Night by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.  Which I highly recommend as a way to look at how to look at life and fix the broken parts. She's a wonderful reading voice, too!  http://www.soundstrue.com/authors/Clarissa_Pinkola_Estes/  She also wrote a book called Women Who Run with Wolves which I've yet to read but look forward to greatly. Or you can find her on www.Amazon.com or www.Audible.com 

Pumpkin is quite irritated with me for putting that little bit of anti-flea and tick stuff on the back of his neck. I've to to sneak up on him to do it and then he is convinced I'm trying to kill him instead of making him feel better.  He's now slinking around the house trying to avoid me as I've suddenly turned evil again after being nothing but indulgent to him for 3.5 years.  I love these cats and I guess I 'own' them as much as cats can be owned, but compared to my Simpkin I had for 18 years, damn they are dumb!  But lord knows they are very good hunters!  I've got to give them that!
Happy Thanksgiving!  I've got to make marinade tomorrow and inject 4 Turkeys to deep fry tomorrow! 

MIA

Yes, I've been off the grid, but in that time I've managed to make some decisions and that's always good! I have decided after a visit home to New Orleans that it is time to move back. Now, all I have to do is figure out how! Hopefully it will be before the Winter Solstice and I can enjoy a very mild Southern winter and get my mojo back.

New Orleans is a special place and anyone who's ever spent any time there outside of Bourbon St. and the French Qrt. will know this to be true. Ain't nothing else like livin' on the bayou!

Now all I have to do is figure out how to find homes for my beautiful loving no-longer-feral cats. I am tempted to take Kagome' with me as he's sort of glued himself to me and is just the quintessential love bug! But he's also a tad skittish and living with two dogs, 5 chickens, a cat strange to him and two horses not to mention a lot of them scary two legged things might just freak him out seriously! But I think he'd like to stay with me as both he and Fleur have rarely left my side since returning to NY. Go figure.

And So IT begins...

It has been suggested that I start a blog. However, for so long the thought of it has filled me with anxiety. What if so and so reads this? What if I say something really stupid, which I am famous for, and it gets me in heaps of trouble? What if I bore myself to death because I don't really have anything to say?
Lots of What-ifs, but I can try it out and see how I feel about it and then I can decide if I wanna tell anyone I know I am finally giving into what is decidedly a very self-centered act. While I am quite self absorbed, I often am not comfortable with being so self-centered as it is significantly louder, and I have become a bit more tempered as I hit my 40's.

So for what it is worth, here I am. I'm in my 40's, as I've mentioned, I share a very tiny apt. in the middle of nowhere with 4 not-so-feral-anymore cats that were dumped on me by their mother before she split town, for apparently the great catnip pasture in the sky the poor dear. I'd tried for so long not to be the 'crazy cat lady' and only had one cat, more of a significant other, often called Sim for short. Sim and I moved into this little tiny spec of an apt on some wet lands after my relationship hit the rocks. I figured it would be a wonderful place to meditate and soak up nature, listen to the birds and lick my wounds of a 'he just ain't that into you' that went on two years longer than the four + years it was in existence- we tend to beat dead horses in my family. Soon a calico feral cat came around talking her head off and asking for a bite to eat here and there explaining that she'd got herself in the 'family way' and was all on her own and just beside herself over it all. Sim and I felt a little sorry for her so we didn't chase her off like we should have and soon she got so round it was a wonder she didn't stagger from the weight shifting! And after she'd suckered us in, she gave birth to 6 kittens. As life is hard and damned unfair, 3 years later there are now 5 cats living of the original 6 and both Maa Preggers (the hussy mother of the brood) and Sim have both passed away - Sim from kidney failure at 18 years of age. Now for roommates I have Kagome', Fleur, Pumpkin and Fuzzbutt; they are beautiful healthy sweet rag doll type cats who are weary of my intentions at times and dumber than a box of rocks! Sim was remarkably intelligent and compared to the Plume-tail Gang, as I refer to them as, a rocket scientist compared to a bunch of sugar amped 3 year olds. Yet, I've grown used to them and they me and each night we get in bed and they hunker up next to me, turn over on their backs and demand tummy rubs. There is no logic here.

So, this is a little bit about me a crazy cat lady of the wetlands.